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Beth Sachs doesn’t believe for a minute that the choice is between a successful business climate and a decent, clean environment.

Just look at the Burlington-based Vermont Energy Investment Corp. she co-founded with the late Blair Hamilton. At least 260 people work there, and offshoots of the company have extended to Washington, D.C., and Ohio. And, she says, VEIC will keep growing.

For her work, Sachs is nominated for the Green Mountain Environmental Leadership Award, in the persistence division. The award honors people and organizations which have a positive influence on Vermont’s environment.

In many respects, Sachs and Hamilton were pioneers when they started VEIC a quarter century ago. Energy efficiency was just starting to catch on in some places in the East Coast and Pacific Northwest, she said. But it wasn’t mainstream.

Now it is. People are recognizing that energy efficiency is the least expenses and cleanest energy you can get, she points out. You don’t pay for fuel, and you don’t pollute the atmosphere or contribute to greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency.

For the hard-nosed business types, an organization like VEIC can show, through solid data, how much money energy efficiency saves, and what effects it has on the bottom line.

Hamilton died last year, but his vision, along with Sachs’, remain at the core of VEIC, she said.

Sach said when she turned over the executive director reins to Scott Johnstone three years ago, she wrote down a list of the key aspects of VEIC’s vision. “Thinking big and being innovative were two of the most important,” she said.

Organizations like VEIC are also important in the face of global warming, which appears to be accelerating, Sachs said. “Climate change is an enormous threat. We can’t think small,” Sachs said.